Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bring back crappy forums

tedium.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 376 posts

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#251

Post by TheScaryOne »

throw0101a wrote: post #188
Findecanor wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on a few classic forums with threads that are over 20 years old, with a wealth of information about a topic. It is easier to revisit a thread and find new posts when posts are in chronological order. Most such forums remember the last post of your last visit, and takes you to after that position the next time you enter the thread. Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of post…

> Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of posts, especially if subtrees can shift position from up/down-clicks. So threads with no revisits don't last as long. Tree/threaded views are an implementation detail: in e-mail clients you can toggle the threading offset view ("by converstaion"), e.g.: * https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/mail/view-email-... Is there any reason…

Most old forums would let you toggle Flat or Tree view, but Tree view was obviously beholden to hitting "Reply" to the post you were addressing, and not just copying a bunch of people's quotes into a bigger post, which would only show as a branch off of the trunk rather than a leaf in the tree.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#252

Post by g-b-r »

willis936 wrote: post #166
divan wrote: post #160

The word 'crappy' stood out to me. I feel the same sentiment about bringing back forums, but as a person who maintained few of those for many years, I always wanted explicitly non-crappy forums. In fact, I attribute much of the decline of forums to the fact that they were crappy and hard to maintain. Those PHP/Ruby monstrousities, with plugin system that was a security and maintaiability nightmare, made maintaining a…

Discourse has been really nice for about a decade. I'd go as far to say that the remaining challenges are not technical.

Discourse is horrid on slow devices, try it.

Let's just make something better, please, and that doesn't require JavaScript as we are at it.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#253

Post by throwaway2037 »

lazystar wrote: post #74
keiferski wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion. A bit like having one TV news channel that everyone is forced to watch and discuss. You can have tangents but it’s largely discouraged. The Reddit Digg style doesn’t have this and is yet another example of the culture fracturing into a thousand little things rather than one single narrative everyone can talk about. I g…

the biggest issue with reddit/digg/hackernews style comments is how top comments can be gamed for profit. old forums had the problem of "first" and "bump" comments, but steering the conversation was harder.

    > top comments can be gamed for profit
This sounds poetic, but makes no sense to me. I've been here for a few years and I regularly post comments. I still have almost no idea which ones will be up-voted. However, I do know which ones will be down-voted. So tell us, how do you write a comment that can be "gamed for profit"?

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#254

Post by krapp »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #173
divan wrote: post #160

The word 'crappy' stood out to me. I feel the same sentiment about bringing back forums, but as a person who maintained few of those for many years, I always wanted explicitly non-crappy forums. In fact, I attribute much of the decline of forums to the fact that they were crappy and hard to maintain. Those PHP/Ruby monstrousities, with plugin system that was a security and maintaiability nightmare, made maintaining a…

Couldn’t you today make a fairly decent forum technology with all we know today and all libraries available etc? Naive question perhaps (web dev not exactly my cup of tea), but can it really be that hard? Or is that nobody cares enough?

Sure. People post them all the time. Most are HN clones. All of them die with a whimper after the initial HN juice is gone.

The problem isn't technical, the problem is that social media and Reddit already do what people wanted forums to do, and did it better in many ways (albeit at the cost of centralization and homogeneity.) There is just no niche in the web ecosystem for old-school forums anymore, other than appeal to nostalgia.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#256

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

doginasuit wrote: post #33

> We tried the forum thing. We wanted something else. Not necessarily because it was better, though sure, maybe it was. But because it was different. I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the p…

> is a clear improvement

I remember going from usenet, with it's tree comments (when the worked) to flat forums and being annoyed at the change.

25+ years later flat threads are correct threads, and tree comments are just a bad idea.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#257

Post by subpixel »

The forums I keep an eye on have been bought by aggregators who redesign them for maximum ad-suck.

It’s a shame bc very old threads contain massively valuable information and conversation on topics I care about.

One of the best forums moved to a Google Group long ago and that’s maybe the best bad outcome.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#258

Post by g-b-r »

willis936 wrote: post #168
Gigachad wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The era of niche subreddits is over these days. Reddit started ignoring subscriptions and just pooling all posts together and suggesting things the algorithm thinks you are interested in regardless of subscriptions.

I think it goes further than that. Since IPO a huge number of subreddits have been shut down and the disappearance of many moderators. I don't have any way of proving what happened, but it seems awfully coincidental and the result of some private policy change. Reddit has a huge thumb on the scale on their own platform and it is not healthy.

Many moderators left/were removed and subreddits closed as a protest for the lockdown of the API

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#260

Post by donatj »

ipdashc wrote: post #62
donatj wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this hold true in the modern age though? I haven't seen a single thing I wanted to see on social media basically since COVID. It's all famous people, posturing, and things I never followed. Entirely crap I don't care about. At this point I open Facebook like once a day. I used to go on Instagram to see my friend's pictures, now there's nothing of my friends on there and I'll just spam and AI slop... All I want i…

Group chats have kind of taken on this role, haven't they? As you mentioned, Discord fills that spot for young people, but in general I get the impression people spend most of their time on group chat/private server environments nowadays. Social media is mostly treated as read only, a place you get memes or news from. Maybe there's that one rare friend who actually posts on Twitter or Reddit. This gets mentioned occa…

> Social media

> read only

That fails to be social media. That's just media.

Post reply on HN